Re^4: Creating flexible method accessor

[puterboy]

Actually, to clarify -- your suggestion of using ${path} works fine when applied to my original script which allows the multi-level hierarchies I need.

However, it is not obvious (to me) how to make this work in your non-eval script. If I use ${path}, I get all sorts of errors.

Unfortunately, the exercise you leave to the reader is actually the exercise that was the point of my original question :) (though I quite appreciate your provided script).

[Anonymous Monk]

${path} is really just a different way of writing $path:

my $foo = "xyz";
print $foo."bar";   # prints "xyzbar"
print "${foo}bar";  # same

As for making it more flexible: let's say you've got your "path" in an array @path, one way to walk your data structure is: $self = $self->{$_} for @path;

[puterboy]

The problem with 'walking the path' is that there is no guarantee that the path will be: ->{hash1}->{hash2}->{hash3}
It could be any combination of hashes, hashrefs, arrays, arrayrefs -- which is why I wanted to pass a *string* rather than a list (array) of hash keys.

[Anonymous Monk]

Then you might want to start looking into CPAN modules, for example a really quick search brings up Data::Path.

Otherwise, although I would really try to avoid string eval as much as possible, when it is used it's best to limit its scope as much as possible: $self = eval qq{ \$self->$path }; die $@ if $@;